Core Concept: Collaborative Decision-Making in a Product Trio

Teresa Torres argues that product trios (a product manager, designer, and engineer) struggle to agree when they start from individual preferences and jump straight to solutions. Instead, they should first build a shared understanding of customers. Using a streaming-service engagement example, she describes having each member draw an experience map, merging those into one collaborative map, and testing it through joint customer interviews. Visual tools like experience maps and opportunity solution trees let the trio ground decisions in shared customer context. Disagreements remain, but they shift from preference clashes to testable claims about customer needs, which can be resolved quickly.

01Key takeaways

• Shift the discussion from personal preferences to a shared understanding of customer context and needs.
• Have each trio member sketch their own experience map before merging them into one collective version.
• Treat the team's first experience map as a guess and validate it through joint customer interviews.
• Interview customers together so the whole trio builds knowledge and expertise at the same time.
• Use opportunity solution trees to visualize the opportunity space before choosing what to pursue.
• When disagreements arise, frame them as testable claims about customers so they can be resolved quickly.

02Key sections

The problem with jumping to solutions

Team members bring different favorite ideas shaped by stakeholder requests, competitors, or technical interests, making agreement hard. Starting from solutions amplifies individual preferences.

Build a shared customer picture

Each trio member sketches their own experience map of the customer's current journey, then the team co-creates one collective map. This map is treated as a hypothesis rather than fact.

Learn together through interviews

The trio interviews customers together and updates the experience map as they learn. Together they identify unmet needs, pain points, and desires as opportunities.

Decide from a shared starting point

Using the experience map and opportunity solution tree, the team chooses which opportunities and solutions to pursue. Remaining disagreements are about customer needs and can be settled by testing.

03From the post

“In this short video, I walk through what decision-making looks like in a product trio. If you missed the first video in this series, be sure to check that out first: What’s a product trio? You can watch the video or read a lightly edited transcript below. Do”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.